Massad Ayoob's Blog, page 115

A COOL SHOOTIN’ MATCH

In the tiny, cramped “pillbox,” Charles Gautier wields his customized Glock 34 9mm en route to winning the Citrus Challenge.

For a few years now, the Central Florida Rifle and Pistol group in Orlando has been running a major International Defensive Pistol Association match that has earned a reputation as one of the best on the national circuit.  Because it’s held the first weekend in November and I’m usually teaching in Arizona at that time, I had never been able to attend, but a change in schedule this year made it possible.  I’m glad it did.

Every stage was challenging, from the deceptively simple draw-and-shoot of the first challenge we all faced, to events with disappearing targets so fast that, literally, you could blink your eyes and miss seeing at least one of them.  Most of us thought the most demanding event was the one that crammed you into a tiny little pillbox with only three little gun ports to shoot from at an array of nine or so targets across your front.  At least one of the big guys needed help getting out of the box when he was done shooting.

The range safety officers were most fair with penalties and scoring. Not a “range nazi” in the bunch from what I saw.

People as old as me shouldn’t have to be backing away from armed robbers with a heavy-ass Courier’s Case handcuffed to one hand, but the Springfield Armory XD(m) 9mm helped me do that. I consider it Elder Abuse…:-(

I got to shoot in the same squad with the guy who turned out to win the overall match, Charles Gautier.  I had met him before – very knowledgeable and helpful shooter – but hadn’t seen him in action until last weekend’s Citrus Challenge.  His speed, smoothness, and accuracy were a pleasure to watch. Keep an eye on this guy at next year’s World Championships in Puerto Rico.

The shooters I run with, several of whom are my graduates, made me proud.  Among other honors, they captured two divisions with one-two finishes.  Deon Martin was champion in the .45 auto part of things, Custom Defense Pistol division, and John Strayer was right behind him for second overall and First Master. Deon won with the new Glock 41, and John was shooting a 1911.   In Stock Service Revolver division, Michael Dukes captured the Division Champion title, unseating defending champ Allen Davis, who was second overall among the six-shooter stalwarts and First Expert. Fast-rising Anthony Wojtyla won high Sharpshooter in Stock Service Pistol with his Glock 9mm, and a “bump” up to Expert class. The old guy here managed to take the Distinguished Senior title, which is kinda like “high geezer.”

IDPA is a great shooting sport, and a relevant one. Info is available at idpa.com, where you’ll also find a link to Central Florida Rifle And Pistol which has monthly matches, and links to other clubs all over the country, at least one of which is probably within striking distance of you.

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AFTERMATH

Thanks to all who voted!  You made a difference.

Republican control of both houses of Congress is huge for all in the gun owners’ civil rights movement.  The key thing from my point of view is Congressional approval of Federal judges and particularly new Supreme Court justices the lame duck anti-gun President is expected to appoint in the next two years.  The specter of Eric Holder sitting on the Supreme Court is no longer something we need to shudder before.

On local fronts, Charlie Crist, a waffler on more than the gun issue and an opponent of Stand Your Ground rights, missed his Bloomberg-funded bid to topple pro-gun Florida Governor Scott, and Illinois gun owners will be better off with their new Republican governor than they were under the ferociously anti-gun Pat Quinn. A Republican governor has to be an improvement for gun owners in Maryland, too.

Election Day made another specter, that of President Hillary Clinton, a little less substantial. According to TV reports this morning, more than 30 of the Democrats she and her husband campaigned for were trounced.

There were disappointments, though.  In Colorado, Governor Hickenlooper managed to stay in office by less than 1.5% of the vote, thanks to a heavy turnout from the Yuppie enclaves, despite it being proven in public that he had lied to his constituents and his state’s own sheriffs about his ill-conceived, Bloomberg-inspired “assault weapons ban.”  And, in a triumph of Bloomberg purchasing power and propaganda that would have made Goebbels weep in envy, Washington state voters approved the egregious 594 initiative criminalizing ordinary lending of guns between law-abiding people.

Looking at it as a gun owner, I’m not so much into the Republican versus Democrat thing.  I’m a registered Independent, and in most elections vote for candidates from both parties according to the individual rather than the party.  Yet we can’t escape the fact that the Democratic Party itself has published strong anti-gun planks, and the Republican Party has not. I’ll take a proven pro-gun “D” over a waffling or unproven “R” anytime, but the Republican sweep is, in toto, something our side has every right to celebrate.

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‘TIS THE SEASON…

I hope you all and your kids and grandkids have a safe and happy Halloween.

But that’s not the season I’m talking about.

I just got my voting done early, and I urge all of you to make your vote count in the mid-term election only a few days away.  Yeah, pundits are talking about a Republican sweep and a Republican-majority  Senate that would be good news for gun owners…but I’m not nearly so sure of that as some.  Neither are some folks over at Breitbart: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/10/29/T-Minus-6-GOP-Fights-to-Escape-Margin-of-Fraud .

Please get out there and vote.  It’s more important than usual this time.

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CHICKS RULE, REDUX

I’m a father of daughters and have had the privilege of training multiple female shooting champions, including both of those daughters who each won national titles while still in their teens.  I’ve also spoken in court for some forty female law enforcement officers who were fired for failure to qualify with handguns that weren’t the right size for them (and which they sometimes weren’t trained with correctly), when I was able to confirm that proper training and suitable police weapons that DID fit them allowed them to qualify just fine.  So, it pleases this old testosterone creature when the estrogen tribe kicks butt with guns.

At the NRA annual conference in Indianapolis this year, I got to meet Lena Miculek.  She’s the daughter of two old friends: Jerry Miculek, whom I consider the greatest double action revolver shooter of our time and probably ever, and Kay Clark-Miculek, a national champion shooter in her own right and a kick-ass gunsmith who built the Clark Custom Ruger 10/22 I used to earn a Rifleman patch at my first Appleseed event.

Yeah, there may be a genetics component: if the sire and the dam are both Kentucky Derby winners, you can expect their filly to win races, too.  More to the point, though, both Jerry and Kay have shown themselves for decades to be exemplary as both human beings and shooting athletes, and they passed their dedication to excellence along to their daughter as well as all their knowledge.  She has been stomping mucho boo-tay in three-gun (rifle/shotgun/handgun) competition.  Her father is duly appreciative: see photo.

Closer to home for this writer, estrogen still ruled this week.  Last Saturday, we finished a MAG-40 class in Florida and as usual, staff shot a pace-setter demonstration of the qualification, and then it was the students’ turn.  The instructors toss in $5 apiece, top staffer taking all…students pony up a buck each, winning student taking all…and anybody who beats me gets an autographed $5.  Tie scores on point value over the 60-shot qualification course are broken by group measurement: tightest shot cluster prevails.

Among the students were many instructors and some proven competition shooters, and the staff half a dozen state and regional shooting champions and at least four who have held national titles in handgun shooting competition.  When the proverbial gunsmoke had cleared, there were more than a couple of us who had perfect 300 out of 300 scores.  Mine lost on tie-breaker to that of Lt. Col. Dave “the Blaze” Blazek, USAF retired, who last month won the title of high military shooter at the IDPA National Championships in Tulsa.  Dave usually beats me anyway, but to add insult to injury, he did it this time shooting southpaw even though he’s naturally right-handed…and I’m awfully proud of him.

However, beating us BOTH and everyone else, was my own significant other, the Evil Princess.  She does that, every now and then – beating everybody on the range, including all the men, and most cruelly, including ME – because, I suspect, she just likes to feel the testosterone drop about ten degrees in male-dominated environments. J

And nobody’s  prouder of that than me.  Chicks rule!

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BLOWING A SHOT

A few weeks ago in Arkansas, I was teaching a 40-hour class for armed citizens and off duty cops. The course finishes with a tough written exam on deadly force law and tactics, and a 60-shot live fire qualification encompassing dominant hand only, non-dominant hand only, speed reloads, shooting from cover positions, and cetera.  Before the students shoot, the staff runs a “pace-setter”: we shoot the timed course of fire while they watch, so they can get a good mental image of what the stances and techniques they’re expected to perform look like, and how fast they’ll have to do it to score well.  Given that there are fixed time limits, this also lets the observers kinda “set their internal clock.”  Part of the incentive is, whatever score I shoot, if the student ties me they get an autographed dollar bill inscribed, “You tied me at my own game,” and if they outshoot me, they earn an autographed five-dollar bill that says, “You beat me at my own game.”

Nothing makes me prouder of my students than giving them one of those dollar bills. I confess, however, to mixed feelings about having to pay out a fiver.  On the one hand, as I tell them beforehand, there’s no greater compliment a student can pay an instructor than to outperform the teacher in the skill being taught.  On the other hand, there’s the personal excoriation of “Oh, crap, I blew it!”

I normally shoot it with a perfect 300 out of 300 points score, as I damn well should, having run this course for decades.  But – less than half an hour after telling them to stay at a “conscious competence” level and think about every shot as they’re squeezing it off, I violated my own rule and let myself slip into the “unconscious competence” mode sometimes called “automatic pilot.”  The sight alignment was hard and solid from the fifteen yard line, but my stance wasn’t quite perfect for natural point of aim apparently, and about the time that I saw the well-aligned sights had drifted to the right and realized that I was automatically pressing the trigger, there was a very brief instant when I thought, “The sights need to come more left but my finger is pressing the trigger and”  — BANG!

The sights told me the story before I saw the bullet hole: I had broken the shot prematurely with the gun aligned to 3 o’clock of where I needed the shot to go, and that was exactly where the 230 grain Winchester .45 ACP hardball bullet hit…just outside the maximum 5-point zone and into the four-point zone.  I did what I should have done beforehand, and turned off the auto pilot and went back to conscious competence – thinking about what I was doing.  The rest of the shots went center, but I finished with a 299 out of 300…and yes, that cost me more than one five-dollar bill.

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ANTI-GUNNER ADMITS HE SCREWED UP

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School atrocity of December 2012, anti-gun politicians fell over themselves ramrodding poorly crafted legislation into law, in the vain hope that Kool-Aid flavored Band-Aids would somehow cure a societal cancer.  Second only to Governor Cuomo in New York in this respect, was Governor Hickenlooper in Colorado.

When was the last time you saw the majority of sheriffs in their state sue their own Governor over poorly crafted, unenforceable law?  Well, the Colorado fiasco comes most readily to mind. Having had some small part in that litigation, as an expert witness retained to speak for the sheriffs’ side of the case, I have no argument at all with the following cogent analysis by Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.  Thanks to Jim Shepherd at The Shooting Wire for sending it along: http://www.nssfblog.com/colorado-governor-hickenloopers-greatest-hits/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NSSFGR+%28NSSF+Government+Relations%29 .

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LISTEN TO GRPC 2014

In recent blog entries here, I touched on the two days of the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Chicago last month.

It’s official: you can now listen to the entire presentation yourself, with audio links here courtesy of the Second Amendment Foundation: http://www.saf.org/?page_id=4402 .

There’s LOTS of good stuff here.  I was proud to have had a small part of it, on the Gun-Free Zones panel.  As usual at GRPCs, I gained far more knowledge than I dispensed.

Next year’s GRPC will be in Phoenix, Arizona the last full weekend of September 2015. Being someplace where you can carry while attending makes it … better.

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TEXAS RANGERS

            I recently passed through Waco, Texas and had a chance to kick one more item off the bucket list: a visit to the Texas Ranger Museum there.

            As a little boy in the 1950s one of my favorite TV shows was “Tales of the Texas Rangers.” I can’t remember a single plot-line now, but I do recall the strong emphasis on old-fashioned ideals of justice…and I thought it was pretty cool that each Ranger carried a pair of fancy Smith & Wessons.

            Live and learn: I hadn’t known until the visit that some two dozen Texas Rangers died at the Alamo in 1836. 

            I expect the many horsemen and horsewomen among the Backwoods Home readership would have spent more time than I did on the fabulous display of saddles.  In my case, the only bronco I ever owned was a Ford product.  As you might imagine, I spent more time among the impressive gun collection.

            These brave men started out with single-shot muzzle-loaders for both their rifles and handguns, which shows how far back the organization goes. They were the first to use revolvers, the Patterson Colt of 1836. Its rapid fire capability proved to be a force multiplier, and Ranger Samuel Walker convinced Samuel Colt to make a larger and more powerful one, the legendary Walker Colt .44.  In the latter 1800s, they all but standardized on the Colt Single Action Army revolver and the lever-action Winchester rifle, and when the more powerful box magazine 1895 model came out, they flocked to them so fast that they are prevalent in pictures of Rangers during that period.

The Texas Rangers may also have been the first law enforcement agency to (unofficially) adopt the Colt 1911 semiautomatic pistol as soon as it came out, and it remains hugely popular among the Rangers even today.

         Even before that, they were buying semiautomatic rifles as soon as they were introduced, the Winchester 1907 and the Remington Model 8 which dates back to 1906.  While today’s Rangers are issued .357 SIGs and 5.56mm autoloading rifles, they still follow the tradition of carrying privately-owned, department approved handguns, and the 1911 remains a trademark of the Rangers.

            More than perhaps any other agency, the culture of the Rangers encouraged fancy, personalized weapons. Perhaps it was an extension of their historical emphasis on individuality as a means of encouraging superior performance.

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SSSNAKESSS…

I was in a conversation recently which turned in the direction of serpents, and not the two-legged kind.  I’ve never had to shoot a human being, but have found it necessary on occasion to dispatch poisonous snakes. Each time that happened, I was VERY glad to have a pistol on my person.

What’s the collective experience out there?  I’m no herpetologist, but I keep hearing from folks who live in rattlesnake country that today’s rattlers have learned to keep silent and not give warning before they strike.  True?

Please share experiences here.

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JPFO UPDATE

I promised all y’all an update on the situation with Jews for Preservation of Firearms Ownership, now under the umbrella of the Second Amendment Foundation.  The transfer required a three-person board of directors to be named.  As of now, that board consists of Alan Gottlieb, Miko Tempski, and Ohad Lowy. Gottlieb is the founder of SAF, Tempski is general counsel for the same group, and Lowy is a practicing lawyer in the US who was born in Israel.

Two of the three are Jewish, and I for one think that’s important.  The “J” had been missing from JPFO for a while.  Until the takeover, there hadn’t been a Jewish hand at the tiller of JPFO since Charles Heller left his position as executive director a couple of years ago.  The board that continued the mission in the interim was made up entirely of righteous Gentiles. (The capital R term Righteous Gentiles is reserved for those who worked to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. These three good men were born too late to do that.  But they went to considerable personal expense and effort to keep the late JPFO founder Aaron Zelman’s brainchild alive and on course, and that sounds pretty damn righteous to me.)

I think the strongest moral imperative of JPFO grew from the lesson of the Holocaust, than gun registration led to gun confiscation and the creation of helpless victims of government-instituted genocide.  A Second Amendment Sisters run by men, or a Pink Pistols run by straights, would simply lack credibility in its core message.  It was important to re-solidify JPFO’s Jewish identity.

Non-Jews, of course, remain welcome. They have long constituted a majority of JPFO membership.  Hell, I remember when Aaron Zelman and I used to joke about me being the token Arab member.

I’m happy to report that Rabbi Dovid Bendory remains with JPFO, and that the dynamic Charles Heller is back, as director of media relations for JPFO.  Search is underway for a new executive director.

The announcement of JPFO coming under the SAF umbrella was met with enthusiastic applause from the hundreds of gun owners’ civil rights activists attending the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Chicago this past weekend.  Ditto SAF’s tribute to Aaron Zelman.  Some folks had called for mass resignation from JPFO, and SAF received a flurry of nasty-grams, but as of last week only ONE actual dues-paying member had resigned and requested a refund. (I’m told the dues refund was sent.)  In fact, there has been a small spike in membership renewals and new member sign-ups.

Right now, the entire gun rights community is focused on the critical mid-term elections. SAF’s sister organization, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, headquartered in Washington State, is also working overtime to fight the egregious I-594 initiative there. There are also transferred records to be sorted out, and other such mundane administrative matters. For those reasons, I don’t expect the “new” JPFO ball to really get rolling until after the first of next year.

I’ve personally told the two new JPFO directors who were in attendance in Chicago that I’d like to see Zelman’s ground-breaking books on the desks of every Senator, Congressman, and legislative aide on Capitol Hill.  The JPFO message needs to be more widely broadcast, and I have every reason to believe we’ll see exactly that in the coming year.  SAF is well positioned to make it happen.

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